Table of Contents
Preface 1
Chapter 1 Twenty First Century Capitalism, Nineteenth Century Economics
What is the local? 7
What is localism? 8
Localism and value 9
Proudhon versus Marx 11
An extremely short history of capitalism 14
Chapter 2 Local Visions, Global Realities 20
Pro-market localism 21
Idealizing the local 22
Does local money stay in local spaces? 25
Consumers in capitalism 29
Ethical consumption 33
Anti-market localism and the problem of autonomy 38
What's wrong with high-tech? 41
Work as freedom 45
LETS, alternative currency and credit schemes 46
Right-wing localism: immigration 50
Now we see the violence inherent in the system 54
Chapter 3 Growing Alternatives? Centralization, Rent and Agriculture 56
How capitalism transforms the land 58
What is rent? 63
Rent today 64
Pro-market urban agriculture 66
The Markham Foodbelt 67
Anti-market urban agriculture 69
The impact of rent 73
Urban agriculture in the Global South 74
Cuba 76
Urban agriculture as resistance? 79
Rent-to-own 80
Chapter 4 Local Shops for Local People 83
What ideology does 84
Who are the petite bourgeois? 87
The politics of the petite bourgeoisie 89
Habitus 90
Morality 93
Voluntary simplicity 96
Voluntarism 97
Community 98
Lifestyle 101
Utopianism 104
Catastrophism and crisis 107
Malthusianism 111
Localist moralism: the locavore 113
Petite Bourgeois hegemony 119
Chapter 5 Building Socialism from Local Spaces 121
Neocommunitarianism 122
Postcapitalist localism 125
Solidarity Economics 129
The tongue-tied left 136
Does capitalism make us powerless? 138
Capitalism as contradictory 141
Combined and uneven development 144
How could a future socialist society work? 145
Against prefigurative lifestyles 147
For collective prefiguration 150
The working class and Marxism 153
Rosa Luxemburg and social revolution 154
Participatory Budgeting in Toronto 157
The Special Diet Campaign 160
Building counter-power: the Ontario Days of Action and the global justice movement 161
Making freedom global 164
Notes and References 168
Bibliography 171
